Despite what the young Cosette sings, crying is definitely allowed. The plight of Jean Valjean, of Fantine and Cosette and Éponine and perhaps even of Javert, has led millions to the barricade of tears. Sibling editions ran on Broadway (for 16 years) and in 40 other countries in 20 other languages. That production - boasting an epic scale and revolving turntables that made the student revolt literally revolutionary - is still playing in London. It found the form that launched its worldwide success in the 1985 London version that was anglicized by Herbert Kretzmer and directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird. ( READ: Robert Hughes on that “sublime windbag,” Victor Hugo)įilmed a couple dozen times, the 1862 novel became a sung-through show, a pop opera, with music by Claude-Michel Schönberg and a libretto by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, that opened in Paris in 1980. Passion and politics are dirty work: nearly everyone ends up in the sewers.
Valjean adopts and raises Cosette (Amanda Seyfried), who during the 1832 Paris uprising falls in love with the rebel aristocrat Marius (Eddie Redmayne), as does the Thénardiers’ plaintive daughter Éponine (Samantha Barks). Thénardier (Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter). Unknown to him, one of his employees, Fantine (Anne Hathaway), is unfairly fired and forced into prostitution to support her daughter Cosette, raised by the predatory innkeepers M. By 1823, having fled Javert’s obsessive pursuit, he earns wealth and standing under an assumed name as a factory owner and mayor.
His worldview is changed by the intervention of a kindly bishop (Colm Wilkinson), but his luck remains rotten. Based on Victor Hugo’s 1,400-page novel, the musical follows Valjean from his 1815 prison parole after he served 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread and for several attempts at escape. This impressive opening scene of the movie Les Misérables kindles the hope that Tom Hooper, who won an Oscar for directing The King’s Speech, will find reserves of ingenuity to bring one of the world’s most popular stage musicals to potent life onscreen. Finally it swoops into a closeup of one of the prisoners, the emaciated Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), exerting himself in the chorus of the condemned: “Look down, look down/ Upon your fellow man!” Ordered by the warden Javert ( Russell Crowe) to lift a heavy spar that carries another flag, Valjean does so, demonstrating tremendous strength and, in a brief tableau, proving he is a human Jesus, selflessly bearing a cross for the sins of humanity he has suffered all his life - and will suffer until his death. Then it surfaces and ascends high above a ship being dragged into its dock by hundreds of rope-pulling convicts. The movie’s first shot begins underwater, beneath a tattered French flag.
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